The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

by Toth, Josh

• ISBN13: 9781438430355
• ISBN10: 1438430353
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-05-06
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
The Phantom Project Returning: The Passing (On) of the Still Incomplete Project of Modernity	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Ruptures and Specters	p. 7
Exorcisms Without End	p. 18
The (Phantom) Project Still Incomplete	p. 23
Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter): Poststructuralism, Derrida, and the Project Renewed	p. 37
Poststructuralism and/as Postmodernism	p. 37
Private Irony All the Way Down?	p. 45
The Force of Derrida's Indecision	p. 61
Writing of the Ghost (Again): The Failure of Postmodern Metafiction and the Narrative of Renewalism	p. 75
Neither Logocentric nor Logo Centric	p. 75
From an Ethics of Perversity to an Ethics of Indecision	p. 89
Metafiction's Failure and the Rise of Neo-Realism	p. 106
The Project of Renewalism	p. 124
A Conclusion Perhaps	p. 137
Notes	p. 147
Works Cited	p. 183
Index	p. 193
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